Ada Unraveled

by Barbara Sullivan

  “Listen, Gerry, I’ve got to get some sleep. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  “Okay. And, Rachel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m really glad you’re on the case. I think Eddie needs your help.”

  Okay, was that a compliment or an implant in my brain?

  I returned to our bedroom. Matt was sleeping soundly but my mind was still whirring, just beneath the exhaustion. I took Ada’s diary with me into the spare bedroom to read another entry. It was easy to slip under Ada’s quilt. Seemed the perfect place to read her earliest messages.

  This entry described Ada’s experience of running away to her grandma’s with sister Hazel.

  The young Ada thought that the event she was remembering had occurred sometime around her eighth year. Especially poignant was her description of a bus ride in the middle of the night to their grandma’s. It was in this entry that I could see how gifted eleven-year-old Ada truly was. Her description of the darkened towns and long stretches of countryside sliding by the bus windows evoked her loneliness. She wrote with sensitivity of the strangers riding with them, a couple of older Hispanic men slumped over in sleep, a heavy black woman clinging nervously to her cloth bag, and two white men sitting together at the back who kept glancing at the young girls with “dirty eyes.” These finely drawn characters evoked Ada’s fear, and her child’s awareness of the potential for evil everywhere.

  I fell asleep riding that bus down a highway of anguish.

  Chapter 22: Ruth and Hannah

  Thursday, October 9

  I was early for the luncheon with Hannah and Ruth, so I parked in the restaurant lot with the motor running, keeping the chill out.

  I was stewing. Some repugnant combination of corruption and politics was holding up the investigation of the stink hole in Ada’s back yard. No investigation had been done as of this morning. No action at all. I complained to Matt, hoping he could stir the pot somehow. And now I was here, waiting to meet with Ruth, to ferret out more information about Ada.

  I reached into my briefcase lying on the backseat and pulled out Ada’s diary. It was time to open this little book again.

  “Dear Hazel,

  Another time, I remember seeing our father push her down the cellar stairs. He stayed home from work to feed her and care for her this time, but he never stopped drinking. We came home from school and they were fighting in the kitchen. Then he pushed her down the stairs. I heard her bouncing.

  I can’t remember if I thanked you for feeding me when our parents were drunk. We were always so hungry. Like the night we were alone waiting in my bedroom with the bureau pushed up against the door to keep him out. They had just come home from the bar and he was throwing her against the walls, she was screaming at him, calling him her favorite dirty name. Then they went into their bedroom and we tried not to listen, hiding under the covers.

  Later you went downstairs, even walked past their door, and got me some bread and cheese. Thank you Hazel. I’ll miss you forever. I’m crying again. I have to stop. Goodbye for now.

  Your loving sister, Ada

  PS: They haven’t had anything to drink since you died. Maybe they will stop.”

  Hannah and Ruth pulled into the parking spot next to me. I closed the diary and quickly put it back in my briefcase, feeling duplicitous. I was completely caught up in this child’s life of fear. Ada was a smart little girl at eleven. I felt I’d been there on that snowy night.

  I hustled after them through the chilly rain into the restaurant. We settled in a booth and ordered. Made polite noises, talked about the weather, and then fell silent. The cheery warmth and happy voices inside the Mexican restaurant pulled me out of my diary-funk.

  I noticed Hannah glancing at me and realized she expected me to open the conversation, so I did--with my usual directness. I related the little tale I’d just read in Ada’s diary. Ruth didn’t respond. She looked at me with a mix of anger and pleading in her eyes. It made me feel bad. I let it go, looked down at my paper placemat. I’d been curling up the scalloped edges, every other one.

  My hands were restless, as usual. I looked out the rain-streaked window next to our booth. I had a feeling everything I needed to know was sitting out in Matt’s truck, in a little brown diary. Why make this old woman miserable?

  Then she began.

  “I was her aunt...by marriage. I can share childhood memories of Ada’s, too. Maybe because I wasn’t really a relative, she felt she could tell me things…sometimes to the point that I wished she would stop. I was like her psychiatrist, only not.”

  Ruth paused to take a turn at counting the raindrops on our window while the waitress delivered our meals.

  “She never took my advice. I was just a wailing wall, a listening wall. Most of her life. I know there is a truth that must be told about Ada and her suffering—the psychological abuse she endured as a young child, as a wife. But I don’t know what it is. Or she would have left the pain, somewhere along the way.” Ruth’s scratchy voice trailed off as her eyes refocused on something distant and deep inside.

  I worried at Ruth’s pain. She wasn’t young. I noted that my enchilada-tamale lunch began congealing the minute it was laid before me.

  I wasn’t hungry anyway. Autopsies. A diary of dreadful secrets. Interrogations of the elderly. I nudged my plate away and sipped the iced tea.

  “Mom, why don’t you tell us about her parents?” Hannah gently urged.

  “Yes, well you know about Gordon and Jolene…”

  Yes, I did. It was all in the diary.

  “…that he was a, well, a wife beater. They were both alcoholics, she, mostly because he was, or so I wanted to believe….”

  Her ancient voice droned on. I half listened.

  “Many wouldn’t believe ill of him anyway. They saw a different Gordon, a Gordon who was a successful businessman, who owned a large boat, belonged to the San Diego Yacht Club, was even Commodore one year. They called them GoJo because they were inseparable and they seemed to live the perfect life. Gordon was movie star handsome, you know, Jolene was too, when they first met. But he changed all that.

  “How they could not have seen the bruises is beyond me…both the men and the women laid blame on the victim. She missed so many bees over the years…”

  Who was she talking about? Jolene? Ada? Hannah read my mind.

  “Who, mom?”

  “Oh. Jolene. Well, and Ada. Like mother like daughter, I guess. It gets blurry now. Sorting out who suffered what. Growing up in a house of pain shattered Ada’s courage. Taught her to accept life’s lot. She was crippled by her childhood.”

  Ruth stopped again, her face a mask of dejection behind which I could only guess at the emotions.

  “That story you just read, about them looking for Christmas trees? She ended up in the hospital after that time. When she got home, a cast on another arm, heavy makeup to cover the scratches and bruises on her face, they celebrated Christmas like nothing had happened. I remember. That Christmas Gordon gave her a huge bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a mink cape. And they were sober when we came calling. It was grotesque to see her don the cape like a little girl, so proud, pulling it over her broken wing. She was trapped in many ways by Gordon, his violence, his charm, his growing wealth. By the time Gordon’s business hit the skids it was too late for her to leave him. Hazel and Ada watched it all. Hazel, well she took a different road, somewhere around her twelfth birthday. She veered off…then she was dead. They were only a year apart, you know.”

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  “Accident,” Ruth said, but her rheumy eyes blazed with anger. “Another Gordon accident.”

  She meant that Gordon had something to do with Hazel’s death.

  My eyes slid to those of a man, sitting almost directly behind Ruth. He was staring intently at us. At Ruth, specifically.

  I wouldn’t have noticed except he looked like a street person, his clothes, his unshaven face and wild eyes. He was sipping a beer. Finally he real
ized I was looking at him, and he grinned. An evil, salacious grin.

  I tore my eyes away and looked down at my rigor mortising lunch.

  “Ruth, did Luke kill Ada? We need to know what you and the rest of the family know, because bad things are still happening. Jake’s death. Luke’s gone missing.”

  “Mark killed her,” Ruth said, mysteriously.

  Hannah said, “But Mark died years before.”

  I followed Ruth’s line of thinking, saying, “How did Mark kill her?”

  “Because he loved her. Because he gave her a love-child.”

  Hannah said, “Eddie? Mark is Eddie’s father?”

  But Ruth had doubled over, clutching at her stomach.

  “I’m not a part of that clan! Don’t include me with them. Those Stowalls are…well, just you remember that, Hannah. We’re not a part of them.” She was growing agitated.

  Hannah said, “Victoria’s your sister.”

  “Sister!” Ruth spat out angrily. Heads turned at the next table. “Not her son or daughter. You remember that, Hannah. We’re not those Stowalls. We’re McMichaels.”

  Ruth suddenly grabbed at her stomach with both arms and began rocking.

  “Mom…?”

  “Oh no, it’s my IBS. What the blazes did I just eat? I gotta go. Take me home, Hannah. Now!” And in a flurry of need the two were gone.

  Chapter 23: Eddie 6

  The redhead came to see him one more time. She was angry about the bruises on his body. Luke was in and out even during the day now, drunk and raging.

  The girl amazed him again, saying he needed to go shopping. She gave him money. He didn’t want to make her feel bad but he couldn’t go outside.

  He told her this, but she just shook her pretty red hair and said, “You’ll be fine, Eddie. No one will even notice you.”

  But he wouldn’t be fine. He didn’t understand out there.

  And he looked too strange not to be noticed.

  She insisted, saying next time one of the aunts would drive him to the store. Assured him it wasn’t far. And finally she’d left. Eddie began missing her the moment the door closed, the moment she left him standing forlornly in the stained kitchen. Waiting for trouble to arrive in the form of his drunken beast of a father.

  Luke, he’s not a father.

  No father would behave the way he does.

  The redhead was leaving him to his own defenses. He was thinking he should ask her to return the diary he knows she took.

  A new thought came to him. What if his mom had kept other diaries? Luke’s out at some bar, should be gone for a while longer.

  Resolutely, Eddie climbed the stairs to the upper rooms of the house.

  He slipped inside the room where he once slept, and his eyes opened in wide astonishment.

  The room had been…it was papered with quilts.

  Even the ceiling. She’d hung her quilts all around his room and even fastened them to the ceiling. The curtains on the small window that looked out on the cemetery were even constructed of her quilts.

  It was like a quilted mausoleum. And his bed was covered with the most beautiful quilt he’d ever seen. It looked like it was made of white silks, like, wedding dress materials, all beaded and sequined and embroidered. Maybe one of the dresses had been her own. The nightstand next to the bed held a picture of him. He picked it up. Stared at his young self. Grieved.

  Moved on.

  There was a drawer in the nightstand. He pulled it open. And there it was…a second diary.

  He picked it up, pushed the drawer shut and retreated back down to the main floor bedroom.

  Eddie placed the little leather book next to his new bed.

  He went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out his mother’s makeup case, a small zippered pouch many years old and filthy with cosmetic oils and dyes. And her fingerprints. And her DNA. And her smells. Eddie had retrieved this from the upstairs bathroom yesterday.

  He opened the pouch and pulled out her face powder.

  Watching himself in the mirror as he worked, he applied a light layer of ‘paleness’, as his mother once called it, to lighten her complexion. To cover the bruises. Now he was doing the same. The smells of the makeup calmed him.

  Chapter 24: Tom Beardsley

  When I got home from the awful lunch, I found a phone message from Matt that they’d put Jake Stowall back in the ground this morning.

  I grabbed a snack from the fridge, jotted some notes down from the luncheon, jogged three miles with Wisdom, and faxed Hannah and Gerry copies of the contracts Matt and I had written up. Then I cleaned house.

  Until the phone rang, that is.

  It was an angry Detective Junior Grade Tom Beardsley. I was thinking he wanted to discuss the fact that his sister had been with me in Ada’s backyard, but that wasn’t it. I was surprised, until I slowly caught on to what was happening.

  “You had no business going to Ada’s house, Ms. Lyons. You had no business snooping around in the back yard. You were on private property, now officially a crime scene.”

  His breathing was rapid, his voice elevated. He was lying and uncomfortable. Someone was listening to him. Maybe monitoring what he was saying. He was speaking to them, not to me.

  Really? What on earth was going on?

  I said, “What did you find in the back…?”

  He cut me off.

  “The Stowall house is an official crime scene now. You shouldn’t have been there.”

  His angry voice was getting to me, and I fought the natural reaction to lash back. He was clearly trying to signal me something.

  “First of all, I have every right to investigate under the California Penal Code. If you need chapter and verse on those statutes, let me know, I’ll be happy to send you a copy. And which crime has your department decided to acknowledge that makes the Luke Stowall house a crime scene now?”

  Okay, so I didn’t completely succeed in controlling the urge to mirror. And that question was way too hard. I’d have to slow down. After thinking we’d probably been disconnected Tom Beardsley finally returned.

  He said, “It’s official. Jake Stowall’s death is officially classified as suspicious by the medical examiner. The level of snake venom in his body was six times what a normal Western Rattlesnake could deliver in one--or even several bites. In fact…” Another brief pause. I grinned. This was so silly. “In fact…the amount of venom found in tissue samples taken from the left leg could only have been introduced into the body artificially.” He was being prompted, and reading. Loudly.

  I said, “Officially suspicious. Wow.”

  Sometimes I just can’t help myself. Tom didn’t skip a beat.

  “Jake Stowall died of a massive overdose of snake venom. A large animal tranquilizer dart found near the crime scene held traces of snake venom.”

  I said, “What delivery mechanism..?”

  He cut me off again. “They sell auxiliary barrels that can be attached to the muzzle end of any ordinary firearm loaded with blanks….”

  He caught himself, or someone caught him. Started anew.

  “For a copy of the M.E. report you need to make a trip downtown and fill out form twenty-eight fifty-seven.”

  Not true. Cops and sheriffs faxed us stuff all the time. The mid-levels just wanted some face time with me. And they were definitely midlevel managers; higher ups know better than to do face-to-face over the phone.

  No faces. No face-to-face.

  It was so silly. Definitely dummies. Maybe not even midlevel.

  I sought clarification. “So, it’s a crime? The Cleveland County M.E. has found Jake Stowalls’ death to be of a suspicious nature, so we’re looking for a bad guy?”

  Another blank spot in the flow of conversation.

  “Detective..?”

  Beardsley said, “I’m here. Just a minute.”

  I was beginning to wonder why the guys in his department hadn’t eaten him alive by now. He was a baby. Then I began to wonder if bro
ther-in-law Patrone had had a hand in his promotion.

  Alright, that was unfair. I have some idea of the kind of boy’s games that predominantly all-male occupations get wrapped up in. Tom was still an initiate. He was paying his dues, no matter how dumb the games.

  He finally came back to the conversation and read some more of the details from the M.E.’s report. But I wanted to know about Ada. I jumped in.

  “How about Ada? Has her death been deemed suspicious yet? You guys could begin your investigation with Ada’s medical records at Cleveland Central. And what about the stink hole in Ada’s backyard?”

  Uh-oh. Too much info.

  Tom said, “Listen, Ms. Lyons, it’s none of your business what investigations we have ongoing here. I mean, I can’t give you that information over the phone. The department is currently working on finding two missing women. But I have put you on notice that you are hereby ordered to stay off the Stowall property, do you understand?”

  So they still hadn’t been out there yet. I bit my tongue. My blood was boiling, but I’d already made an error, discussing Ada’s medical records.

  And now I was listening to a dial tone.

  After starting a clothes wash, I pulled out my cell phone and placed a call to the Beardsley-Pustovoytenko family. I needed to warn Gloria that I’d let slip about Ada’s records.

  Maybe ask some more questions before the you-know-what hit the fan.

  Abigail answered on the third ring, throwing me off.

  “Hi Abby. This is Rachel Lyons. How are you doing this morning?”

  Silence. I bravely continued.

  “I have a question about your father, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Ve do.” Abigail’s voice had deepened. I was now talking to Gloria--she of the thick Ukrainian accent. I put on my Ukrainian translator ears.

  “You leaf us alone. I don’t like vat you are doing. I don’t like dis whole dirty bizness…”

  Uh-oh. Maybe the fan had already been hit. In the background I could hear Abigail complain and demand the phone back.